The process of creating your first StoryMap can be a daunting one. It may be easy to picture your finished story—but the involved planning, research, and content organization may seem so precarious that it overwhelms your ability to create an efficient narrative. Read further below for personal advice on how to not only efficiently guide your text, but also satisfy yourself and your readers with the final story — without stumbling too much.
Prepare, Plan, and Ponder
Read articles that offer advice on StoryMap planning, especially those written for beginning creators. This article from ESRI is an excellent beginning resource to read and describes a ‘formula’ to help maintain your story’s organization. Another (more amusing) piece to check out from ESRI is “How to make an awful ArcGIS StoryMap.” While it may not seem as initially useful, just knowing common StoryMap mistakes will allow your story to be more likely well-received! Following the advice from the first linked article, I came up with some basic questions to help attune my writing’s purpose and audience. Create some questions of your own to do the same, or feel free to build off some of my questions below.
- Who do I want to read my story?
- What do I want my audience to take away from the story?
- How can I effectively guide my readers to understand the material?
Then, come up with some further questions to determine the most important takeaways from the narrative. These questions will make your readers’ more likely to understand the point of the story, as well as prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed or adding too much content.
- Why is the length of Pennsylvania’s impaired streams increasing?
- Where is Pennsylvania’s current water quality issues stemming from?
- What can be and has been done to counteract the effects of water contaminants?
With these questions, you will likely have a better understanding on the requirements and goals involved for your story. Now, piece all of this preparation content into an outline. Your outline can be drawings of the slides, a document with bullets, or anything else that works with your method of thinking and planning. Just try to use your previous questions to create some sort of visual guide, and you will be much better prepared to dive into the researching and writing.
My outlining process involved a rough sketch of individual sections or pages of my story, and which portions of my story I wanted to be interactive maps, static maps, images, or just text. The creation of my outline gave me a better sense of the time commitment involved and an idea of some specific features to include.
Research and Resources
Research is crucial in the planning and writing of most (if not all) StoryMaps. If you do not have much experience gathering authoritative information, do not worry—there are many places to check out!
The number of accessible resources online and in libraries may seem overwhelming from a general search. However, while universities, governmental agencies, private research institutions, and more provide a majority of the accessible authoritative content, many of them also provide databases and search engines designed for efficient locating. Check out PSU Libraries’ Search, RefSeek, and CrossRef for high quality resources to use in your story.
The Penn State University Libraries’ Library Guides offers many valuable resources to begin researching most topics for a StoryMap. There are two library guides beneficial for StoryMap creation and research—the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) guide and the ArcGIS Online guide. The GIS guide can help with finding geospatial databases–from Pennsylvania, other states, and beyond the United States, along with insight on other subtopics. The ArcGIS Online guide has many instructional materials and resources on StoryMaps, alongside pages on other ArcGIS Online features.
If residing or focusing your story within Pennsylvania, the state’s official geospatial data depository (PASDA) will likely have the data usable for your narrative. PASDA receives its geospatial data from various governmental, private, and academic institutions.
The ArcGIS Online Content library also provides similar resources to PASDA, as well as beyond the scope of Pennsylvania. Before using ArcGIS Online resources however, investigate the data/item source to verify it is trustworthy to use for your story. A workaround is by using ArcGIS Online’s Living Atlas of the World, a library of authoritative and ready-to-use ArcGIS Online content from providers all around the world.
Detailing
Content housekeeping consists of describing items as they are created and published to the ArcGIS Online community. If creating an item such as a web map or instant application, there will be options to specify its item name, description, tags, credits, attributes, and more on its individual page.
Adding descriptive information to the items made for my StoryMap took much longer than I expected, so detail items as soon as its convenient to be thorough and prevent fatigue. While I knew that each web map or application I created showed its features on its individual page, I did not realize that each of these layers also had item pages in need of detailing! For example, the ArcGIS Online item page for one of my Web Maps had three layers of items that required descriptions—the initial Web Map, the individual Feature Layers making up the Web Map, and the individual layers making up each Feature Layer.
Hopefully, this post gave some insight on organization and planning for your first or next Story Map. While most of my advice deals with planning and steps not initially thought about, they impact the communication of your final product greatly.
Ben Brosius is a rising Senior Environmental Resource Management major under the Environmental Science option. He is pursuing minors in GIS and Watersheds and Water Resources. Ben’s interests also include environmental restoration, conservation, and education. He has been working at the Donald H. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information since January 2021.
Leave a Reply